The outskirts of real estate lie miles away from the norm

COMMENTARY

Sure, 2006 was full of "real" real estate news -- home sales sagging, builders' stock plummeting, people offering everything from Hummers to free college tuition to sell their homes.

But the fringes of real estate were chock-full of their own kind of news in 2006. Some of my favorites:

- A British real estate agent who said he was sick of the glowing euphemisms too often used in real estate ads decided it was time to be bluntly honest.

He chose to describe some homes as "grubby, cramped and dirty" or "having all the charm and poise of a vicar on crack." In one ad, he wrote, "It's difficult to imagine a more disgusting house than this."

Julian Bending of Somerset, England, told local news media that his blunt approach had been well-received and that would-be clients thanked him for his honesty.

- Poor, unhappy physician Nicholas Bartha -- dubbed "Dr. Boom" by the New York Daily News -- apparently blew up his town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side last summer while struggling with a bitter divorce. Investigators believe it was a move calculated to keep his ex-wife from getting her court-awarded $4 million settlement.

But the town house, worth about $4 million when it was standing, turned out to be worth $8 million after it was reduced to rubble and turned into that rare thing in New York -- a vacant lot in a desirable neighborhood. The lot was sold in December, and the former Mrs. Bartha is among those in line making a claim on the money.

- Admitting in a statement, "I have built up an intense hatred of real estate agents," an Australian woman pleaded guilty to robbing 25 Melbourne-area residences during open houses, netting $110,000 worth of jewelry and other merchandise. She said she did it to spite her ex-husband, a real estate agent -- though not one who was hosting open houses at the crime scenes. And not, of course, an angry Manhattan doctor.

- The mad scramble to convert apartments and nonresidential buildings into condos finally slowed this year, but not before a developer decided to convert a former Boulder, Colo., mortuary into six living units.

But the company faced that age-old challenge: What, oh, what to do about the unhappy energy that undoubtedly still clung to the funeral home? So it hired a group called Ceremonies for Sacred Living to dance, chant and clang their way through the 84-year-old structure, urging the sadness within its walls to go somewhere else.